Patent decision

BL number
O/370/10
Concerning rights in
GB0616606.0
Hearing Officer
Dr J E Porter
Decision date
22 October 2010
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
George Owen
Provisions discussed
Patents Act 1977 section 1(1)(b)
Keywords
Inventive step
Related Decisions
None

Summary

The invention relates to the scrapping of goods and products which have come to the end of their useful life. It concerns a process which takes the product in question, breaks it up into pieces, separates out certain pieces or material for re-use, and then makes a new composite material out of the remaining matter. Particular features of the process are that the whole product (a vehicle or white goods) is shredded in a fully-assembled condition and, after certain material is separated out, an encapsulating agent is added to the remaining pieces to form the re-usable composite. The result is that no pieces of the vehicle or white goods remain for disposal elsewhere. The hearing officer found the invention of claim 1 and most of the dependent claims to lack an inventive step in light of the prior art documents at issue. Given that not all of the claims were found lacking, the application was remitted to the examiner.

Full decision O/370/10 PDF document60Kb